Input Stories

DOE Under Secretary: U.S. Needs More Geothermal Energy

By NAM NewsroomSeptember 25, 2026

One of the most promising resources for producing reliable, affordable, secure energy “has been beneath our feet all along: heat,” Department of Energy Under Secretary Kyle Haustveit writes in a recent op-ed for Deseret News.

What’s going on: In Utah, Americans are learning how to harness that resource.

  • “The Department of Energy’s Utah Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) has become America’s premier field laboratory for enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS.”
  • FORGE lets researchers and companies drill wells and test technologies “to solve the engineering challenges necessary to turn underground heat into commercial electricity.”

No easy feat: But harnessing geothermal power is no simple task, Haustveit writes.

  • “You must understand the geology, drill efficiently, create productive fracture networks, manage fluid flow and heat transfer, and continuously reduce cost and technical risk.”
  • But Americans solved engineering problems in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing and can solve them again in enhanced geothermal.

From research to deployment: Elsewhere in Utah, Fervo Energy’s Cape Station project is successfully using tried-and-true oil-and-gas technologies in geothermal development.

  • The DOE chose Cape Station—“expected to ultimately produce 500 megawatts, enough electricity to power roughly 365,000 homes”—as the site of an EGS pilot demonstration.
  • Since the op-ed was published, Cape Station has achieved first power—meaning it has become the first “greenfield” EGS project to be synchronized to the grid and export electricity.

Boosting geothermal: Haustveit argues that geothermal should make up a larger share of the U.S. electricity mix—and the DOE is working to make that happen.

  • Much of the supply chain, infrastructure and workforce needed to produce geothermal energy already exists, Haustveit writes.
  • To boost production, the DOE’s Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office is creating a Geothermal Center of Excellence in Colorado to bring focus on large-scale deployment.

The bottom line: America’s economy is growing, and it needs more energy to power it, Haustveit writes.

  • We must “unlock the tremendous heat beneath our feet, and turn it into affordable, reliable, secure, gigawatt-scale American power.”